Former President Donald Trump's promise to carry out "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history" would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.
The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a "devastating" hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America's gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.
Trump has promised to create a "deportation force" to round up undocumented immigrants and eject them from the country. This would entail targeting two groups: the roughly 11 million people who lacked permanent legal status as of 2022 (that's the most recent number from the American Community Survey) and the estimated 2.3 million people who have entered the country without legal status since January 2023 (that figure come from the Department of Homeland Security).
The AIC report estimates that a mass deportation effort would cost an average of $88 billion annually—four times the annual budget of NASA—and $967 billion over a decade. To carry out such a program, the government would have to spend huge sums expanding immigration detention facilities, courtrooms, and other infrastructure. That would include hiring thousands of additional federal employees. In short, a mass deportation plan would be costly to set up, expensive to operate, and difficult to undo once it becomes established.
And for what? The costs of mass deportation would rebound into the economy in several ways. The economy would shrink and federal tax revenues would decline. The construction industry, where an estimated 14 percent of workers are undocumented migrants, would be particularly hard hit, but the effects would be felt throughout the economy.
"Removing that labor would disrupt all forms of construction across the nation, from homes to businesses to basic infrastructure," the AIC notes. "As industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs."
That's an important point. Immigration restrictionists often assume that deporting millions of undocumented workers would allow more Americans to fill those jobs, but the economy is not a zero-sum game. A shrinking economy would be bad news for many workers who aren't directly impacted by Trump's deportation plan.
The AIC's estimates are generally in line with the estimates made earlier this year by analysts at the Penn Wharton Budget Center (PWBM), a fiscal policy think tank housed at the University of Pennsylvania. "The costs of the former president's plan to deport the more than 14 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. today could easily reach more than $1 trillion over 10 years, before taking into account the labor costs necessary for such a project or the unforeseen consequences of reducing the labor supply by such drastic amounts over a short period," reported Marketwatch, which requested the PWBM estimate.
Of course, there are fiscal costs that come from illegal immigration too. A recent study published by the Manhattan Institute estimates that undocumented immigrants who have crossed the southern border since 2021 will cost taxpayers about $1.15 trillion over their lifetimes.
That same report notes that more immigration will generally boost the U.S. economy and help reduce future federal budget deficits—"the average new immigrant (lawful or unlawful) has a positive fiscal impact and reduces the federal budget deficit by over $10,000 during his lifetime," writes Daniel DiMartino, the Manhattan Institute report's author. It is younger, college-educated immigrants who pull up that average. Low-skilled immigrants who lack a college degree are generally a net negative for the federal budget.
Both reports ought to make a case for fixing America's convoluted immigration system so more people can come here legally. That would be a better use of political resources than a costly and damaging deportation scheme.
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